So I’m reading Michael Slater’s new biography of Charles Dickens. (It has very, very small print, but that’s neither here nor there for the purposes of this post. It is a little trying on the eyes, though.) Slater focuses on Dickens as a working writer. The guy worked, then worked some more, then did some work. Nothing but work, work, work like the proverbial dog–from his youth until he worked himself to death in his 50s. As Simon Callow put it a tad more gracefully in his Guardian review of the book,
There are times in Michael Slater’s indispensable new biography when one simply has to close the book from sheer exhaustion at its subject’s expenditure of energy. It’s like being sprayed by the ocean. Even Dickens was astonished at it: “How strange it is,” he said, “to be never at rest!”
I have been thinking about what a working writer can learn from Dickens. In some ways, he exists outside the ring of people whom you can usefully emulate. First of all, he’s Charles Dickens. Nobody else can be Charles Dickens, just like nobody else can be Shakespeare or Tolstoy.
How about Dickens as a cautionary tale, then? You could learn a thing or two from Mr. D. about the dangers of overwork (e.g., exhaustion, death) and about how not to treat wives and publishers. (Dickens was not always fair or kind to either.) Then there’s story Slater tells of the artist who had the original idea for what became the Pickwick Papers, which helped launch Dickens into the literary stratosphere of Victorian England. The illustrator, whose name eludes me at the moment, struggled all night over an illustration that Dickens didn’t like, then walked out into his garden in the morning and shot himself through the heart.
And yet, and still–Dickens knew how to sit down and write, and he must have loved it to do as much of it as he did. He was never content to have one project in hand; he needed two, or three, or seven. Journalism, sketches, novels, plays, operettas: He wrote them all and could rotate among genres as he liked or needed to. He always had room for another idea, and another, and another, and he made room in his schedule for a staggering number of them. Dickens’s energy and his commitment to the act of writing, his ability and desire to do it over and over again, every way he could think of–these are things that a writer can take heart in. Why not love your ideas? Why not spin them into stories the best way you know how? Why not try to do more instead of less? Just be nice to your publishers and your loved ones in the process. And get some rest, for heaven’s sake. No need to work yourself to death. But you do have to do the work. And that’s part of the joy.
Josh says
Haven’t yet read the bio, but I wunna note that, like Wilde, Dickens did other kinds of work pretty intensely too: he was a performer and a tireless editor. Indeed, when I hear the stock complaint that Dickens’s prose is no good (too many words) because he was his own editor, I ask, “Who was a better editor in that era? Would you have preferred Bulwer Lytton?” It’s largely thanks to Dickens’s editorial genius that such great novelists as Wilkie Collins and Mrs Gaskell came to prominence.
Period Dramas says
Thanks very much for your interesting thoughts on this new book and on Dickens himself. I never knew about the tragic death of one of his illustrators. :-(
Thanks for the post!
JHoward says
Thanks, P.D. Glad you enjoyed the post.
Josh, you’re right to mention Dickens as editor. The guy really was unstoppable. I’m only about a third of the way through Slater’s biography now (it’s dense), and CD has already edited the memoir of a famous stage performer as well as taken on a magazine of his own (Master Humphrey’s Clock, most notable for producing “The Old Curiosity Shop”.) On top of all the original writing he was doing. My only regret is that I don’t like him better. I gave up long ago on the idea that a good artist had to be a prince of a guy, but there’s a ruthlessness about Dickens that can be offputting. The ruthlessness may have been part of his success, though.
Pykk says
I’ve come to suspect that the energy you mention was the key to the man — in his writing as well as in everything else; in the ruthlessness too — who can keep up with a fireball? how do you hold one back? how do you stir it to sympathy on a subtle personal level, as well as on the brutal, obvious, shocking, less-personal one that he roared after: those perishing mothers in Boz, the schoolboys beaten and starved by a stupid and vicious schoolmaster, the poor suffering face of a Jo? His poor wife might as well have been Carker facing the train. From Ackroyd’s biography I came away with the idea of him as a performer — a supreme performer — he performed on the page and he performed in life, and he performed, and he performed, and he observed, took note, and performed, and energy blazed out of him, wore him out, and killed him, and his death was the death of a star frying itself down to a dwarf — but the energy made him what he was, and without it would he have been calm long-lived Dickens, or not Dickens at all? And not only him. Wasn’t it George Steiner who started an essay wondering how the Victorians managed to fit so much into their lives, and how a modern could read about them, and not feel, even if only vaguely, shamed?
Re. Why not try to do more instead of less?
Yes, absolutely, yes.
JHoward says
I’m late responding to this, Pykk–sorry–but I wanted to say how much I appreciate your comment. I think you’re exactly right about Dickens as nonstop performer, whose energy “made him what he was.” Perhaps the social sympathy he was able to mobilize made it harder to extend sympathy to certain members of his own family–but that could just be cheap 21st-century psychologizing.
Zeitgeist observation; Dickens as flawed human being seems to be on the collective mind. Perhaps Slater’s biography has something to do with that. Did you see Christopher Hitchens’s essay for the Atlantic this month? “The Dark Side of Dickens: Why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/04/the-dark-side-of-dickens/8031/